TV REVIEW: 'MILDRED PIERCE'

Todd Haynes' Mom-in-Distress Tale Shines But Doesn't Sparkle

By: Clare Elfman

March 28, 2011

(HBO) Why, I wonder, when the acting is superb, the historical times so beautifully depicted, the characters so real, am I left essentially uncomfortable with the first two episodes of the five-part HBO mini-series of Mildred Pierce? Kate Winslet will probably get an Emmy for this portrait of a woman who will work herself to exhaustion to save her family, yet so weak that she’ll make all the wrong emotional decisions that will ultimately drag them down. 

The role of Mildred saved Joan Crawford’s career in the '40s. It earned her an Oscar. It was played then as a “noir” mystery, opening with a murder and going back to tell the story of a sharp-edged, strong-as-iron mother with a fatal flaw: obsessive love for a thankless daughter.

This time, writer-director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) kept his story close to the original intentions of the author, James M. Cain who also wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice. And Kate Winslet is not Joan Crawford. As an actress, she’s better, more nuanced; but as the character is written, she’s clever in business and weak in everything else. She’s less compelling than pitiable.

Yet the canvas is so well-painted.  The sense of struggle to survive during the Great Depression--counting pennies at the grocery store, sitting hopelessly in the employment office. Good film for an art house or for a Masterpiece Theater portrait of women of her era.  But as HBO entertainment, where flawed characters abound, it’s the lack of dimension that disturbs me.  

And where I’ve been happy to watch and re-watch Boardwalk Empire’s Margaret Shroeder (Kelly Macdonald)--a woman caught in the same struggle to keep her kids fed in hard times--watching Mildred struggle to feed her kids and then simply yield without struggle to every other challenge is a downer.  There’s great energy in HBO series’ characters. They are complex and absorbing and non-traditional. The characters have edge and daring.  James M. Cain’s Mildred is not complex.

In the first two episodes, we meet Mildred--a middle-class housewife whose husband has been having an affair.  But nobody seems surprised. Everyone knows he’s been courting Maggy Bierderhof, even Veda--the troublesome older daughter. And nobody seems to blame him. Not much love in that marriage.  Mildred kicks him out.  He doesn’t even bother to ask her if she has enough money to feed the kids. He just takes the car and splits.

Her savvy neighbor explains that she is now a “grass widow” and needs support from a “sugar daddy.” She doesn’t think this is a “fact of life,” though. She simply beds the first guy who makes a pass--a “friend” who probably cheated her husband out of a job. He comes to dinner, no wooing. She’s simply available. And their “affair” is not the usual HBO sexual scene. Yes, her naked legs are in the air to receive this guy, but he’s flabby with a slack beer belly, and post-coital, they argue. Cold coupling. Margaret Shroeder, on the other hand, knows that Nucky Thompson probably had her husband killed. But she’s left with two children to feed. She’s a devoted mother. And although she’s Temperance and Nucky is a bootlegger, she has to eat. The moral issue is evident. She goes to a Temperance organizer and frankly explains her situation. The woman says that you do what you have to do to feed your kids. You understand the moral issue and her difficult response to it. Mildred Pierce never thinks anything through. A neighbor tells her that taking a lover is the thing to do; she does it.  Do you feel engaged enough with this woman to want to follow the complexities of her relationships? They’re not compex. She’s a weak woman.

Did the sex get her any financial support? Evidently not. She’s counting pennies and so she’s forced to take a “demeaning” job as waitress in a cheap coffee shop. She hides the uniform from her snobbish and selfish daughter. Veda is well-played as written, yet she’s a character who seems unreal. She plays at being “superior”; we don’t know why. She assumes an “upper-class” stilted way of speaking. She abhors “peasants.” Where she gets all this crud, we are not told.  She’s just presented as a “bad seed.” And when  she discovers a waitress uniform hidden in her mother’s closet, she intentionally humiliates her mother.

And this is perhaps the second scene where we see Mildred’s frailty. Veda has humiliated her mother. She does it purposefully and coldly. Mildred’s first reaction is to slap Veda.  But she cannot bear to lose the affection of this child, and suddenly she embraces her, tells her that she was right to take this superior attitude, that she’s never to change and that she’s giving this family a direction. With that speech, I lost my sympathy for the character, no matter how real, no matter how well-presented. She may be plucky and ambitious, but she’s as bad as Veda.

Her third bad decision is to befriend a customer in the restaurant who jokingly invites her away for the weekend. He’s attractive, she accepts. This one she likes physically. But he’s a guy with a bit of an income and no ambition. He’s a loafer. Yet she falls for him. He’s clear trouble. She’s as self-indulgent as Veda. Three strikes, and I am vaguely curious about how this plays out but not intrigued enough to make this show a priority.

Kate Winslet is a fine actress, but this is a one-note role. Anna Karenina had a mother/children problem. Married to a boring and unfeeling man, she falls in love with a handsome officer. Madly sexually in love. She can have him, but she must give up her children. Sophie’s choice. She’s lost, there is no alternative, and my heart is with her as she throws herself under the train. Mildred is weak. She is as status-conscious as the bratty daughter. She follows her sexual desires with a rotter of no consequence. And you know, in episode 2, that he will be the source of her disasters.  

True to life? I’m sure. Plenty of people in our own lives make careless decisions like Mildred. They’re predictable.  In classic tragedy, the hero is doomed because the gods decree it. In modern tragedy, the character is doomed because of his own weakness. Mildred is not multi-dimensional enough to make a fascinating character. She’s pitiable. But I’ve only seen two episodes.

In any case, the film is so well-drawn, you have to watch it once. But whether I’ll Tivo it to watch again and again like Boardwalk Empire or Deadwood, I don’t think.